YOUR SCREWED! FOLLOW THE MONEY!

I first want to declare that I don’t believe in the Constitution. I am with Lysander Spooner on that score. It confers no legitimate authority on the federal government. Furthermore, many of its intended (or pretended) benefits have been lost to congressional encroachment and courts’ misinterpretations. Nevertheless, it is still regarded as “the supreme law of the land,” by most Americans, with adoring lip service paid to it by virtually every lawyer and politician.

Nor do I believe taxation is ever legit. It is extortion. No individual has a rightful authority to take a neighbor’s property by force or coercion, and it is obviously impossible for individuals to delegate an authority to government they do not themselves possess. However, this essay is written as though the prevailing belief that the Constitution controls the federal government is factual rather than mythical, and it treats taxation as a power the federal government may exercise, but only as prescribed and limited by the Constitution.

Most people who visit the Liberty.me website are aware that the federal government is screwing them in one way or another all the time. Well, here is another way you’re being screwed by your rulers, of which you may not be aware. It is as though new copies of the Constitution were printed by the Government Printing Office omitting the Bill of Rights (BOR), and nobody noticed until the stripped-down version had been so widely distributed through government schools without creating a backlash it became the law of the land by default, with federal courts refusing to enforce an anachronism most Americans never met.

However, more important than any article of the BOR as a constitutional safeguard of individual liberty, perhaps even more indispensable than the BOR as a whole, is this: Article I, Section 2, clause 3: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers…”

This protection was unique among constitutional safeguards of individual liberty in that it was reiterated by the Framers of the Constitution in Article I, Section 9, clause 4: “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” Evidently the Framers took extra care to ensure direct taxes would never be levied without being apportioned.

Apportioning a tax requires Congress to first determine the total amount of the tax to be levied, and then divide the total among the states in proportion to their respective populations. Each state would then either pay its share of the tax if it had the necessary funds and did not want to further burden its taxpayers, or it could collect the required amount from its people as its legislature thought best. If a state failed to pay its share, the federal government could tax the state’s people directly.

Article 1, Section 9, is the section of the Constitution as originally adopted containing explicit protections of the rights of individuals. Many Americans contemplating the new Constitution felt Section 9 did not go far enough in protecting individuals from the new government. An agreement was reached with dissenters that the first Congress would immediately add a BOR, which was essential to the adoption of the Constitution. Section 9 contains several BOR-like provisions, such as ensuring the writ of habeas corpus would always be available (with two glaring exceptions), forbidding bills of attainder and ex-post facto laws, requiring direct taxes be apportioned, prohibiting titles of nobility, and other safeguards of people’s liberty from encroachments by government.

Another clause of the Constitution pertaining to taxes, which need be mentioned, is Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence [sic] and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States…” (Duties, imposts and excises are indirect taxes.)

Although it is seldom thought of as such, the limitation imposed on Congress’ use of its taxing powers for those three stated purposes only, was also designed to protect people’s liberty from destruction by means of taxation. Unfortunately, the meaning of “general welfare” has been creatively enlarged through legislation by Congress and sanctioned by federal courts to include anything the rulers want to enact for their own and their “constituents’” welfare. Most of the activities of the federal government today have nothing to do with the common defense or general welfare of the nation’s people and thus are unconstitutional. The amount of taxation required to fund the current panoply of government activities not contemplated by the authors of the Constitution is toxic in its effects on taxpayers’ freedom. When combined with the unapportioned, direct, income tax to fund such unlawful measures, the consequences are fatal to liberty. The combination has made productive working Americans the equivalent of slaves to the rulers and their bootlicking dependents.

In the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) case of McCulloch v. Maryland, (1819), Chief Justice John Marshall is often credited with creating a legal axiom, although he was merely reiterating a phrase initially spoken by Daniel Webster, the celebrated constitutional lawyer representing McCulloch in his argument before the bar. The phrase has since become a legal axiom. As Marshall stated the axiom in his opinion, “The power to tax involves the power to destroy.” Commenting on that case and axiom in a 1976 essay, distinguished libertarian historian, Clarence Carson (1926-2003) wrote: “If the power of a state to tax the Federal government could destroy the instrumentality taxed, (which is what the McCulloch v. Maryland court concluded) how much more readily could government taxation destroy relatively helpless individuals?”

Pursuant to the Constitution, taxes are either indirect and must be uniform throughout the states, or direct and must be apportioned between the people of the several states in accord with their respective populations. Grave dangers are posed to legislators’ longevity in office if they attempt to levy direct taxes. Because direct taxes essentially strip taxpayers of their privacy and heavily impinge on their liberty, voting taxpayers are likely to give legislators who pass them the boot at the next election. It was understood by the Founders and Framers that resort to direct taxes for these and other reasons would be limited to crises such as war. Furthermore, collecting indirect taxes is exponentially easier and more productive than direct taxes—if, and only if–that pesky, iterated, apportionment requirement is honored. If not, direct taxes become a bonanza of easy pickings from the pockets of taxpayers by their rulers.

The difficulties of levying and collecting an apportioned tax may be likened to trying to pull a tiger’s wisdom teeth without an anesthetic. The spawn of what are now ubiquitous, unapportion, direct taxes is the unfettered political corruption pervading Washington, D.C. today, which is why Donald Trump’s purely rhetorical promise to “drain the (D.C.) swamp” resonated with so many Americans. In the minds of the Founders and Framers, direct taxes were perilous to the “blessings of liberty” the Constitution was meant to secure, so they made it nigh on to impossible for Congress to levy a direct tax except in dire circumstances, such as during war, by the simple device of requiring direct taxes be apportioned. Or so they thought.

If the BOR had stated, “Congress shall make no laws destroying the lives or property of the people by means of taxation,” it would have been redundant, merely reiterating the protection afforded by the requirement that direct taxes be apportioned. Unapportioned direct taxes are a more efficient means of destroying people’s lives, liberty and property than was the guillotine used by the French government during its Reign of Terror. It is far easier to destroy lots of people’s lives through direct taxes than one by one on the guillotine, which is why Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto called for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax,” a direct tax, as a “means of despotic inroads on the rights of property.” Although Marx’s communism could not have been contemplated by those intrepid early Americans, they had experience with despotic inroads on their rights of property by the British Parliament, and they thought they could protect themselves against legislated despotism by placing severe limitations on the legislature’s power to extract taxes directly from individuals. They were, of course, wrong.

Throughout history rulers have lived off taxation. As a class, they have been willing to do anything, say anything, be anything to keep the revenues they depend on flowing. Based on the behavior of government actors, there is only one rational way to think of them viz-a-viz “we the people.” It is them against us! And they alone have guns with “authority” to use them against us to ensure their taxes are expeditiously collected. A study of the history of taxes in America demonstrates that every president, legislator, judge and justice is eventually corrupted by relying on a system of taxation, which makes them dependent on force and violence to obtain their daily bread. Undoubtedly many good people enter “public” service, but they cannot remain honest while dependent on taxes—stolen property.

Can this be? All government operatives corrupt? Yep! FOLLOW THE MONEY! When we are speaking of taxes, that’s easy. It comes out of your pocket and goes into theirs by a procedure identical to the crime of extortion. The state may spend some of it on “we the people,” but before the people see any of it come back to them, rest assured the government folks will have taken a large chunk for themselves, their special interests and their cronies. Whatever the people may get back could have been purchased for a fraction of what they paid for it in taxes.

Because the federal, individual income tax is a direct tax being collected without being apportioned as required by the Constitution, it constitutes the largest fraud and most profitable pillaging of any population in all of history, surpassing the bountiful plunders of all the Egyptian Pharaohs, Roman Emperors and Genghis Kahn combined by infinitude. It has served to enslave and impoverish America’s productive class. No one but Jesus could refrain from dipping into the abundance of OPM available to rulers without fear of censure or condemnation thanks to unapportioned, direct taxation. (re., OPM: sounds like opium, is equally addictive, stands for Other People’s Money—forcibly extorted.)

How you lost your constitutional protection from the ravages of direct taxes is laid out in all the maddening details in the only comprehensive history of taxation in America written from the point of view of a taxpayer-scholar with no personal axe to grind. The book, The Great Income Tax Hoax, (1985), was written by Irwin Schiff, unquestionably the bravest American Patriot since Nathan Hale. The book is meticulously researched, the material carefully analyzed and its logical conclusions thoroughly documented by a brilliant scholar, economist and historian.

Schiff was imprisoned three times for almost twenty years for publishing the details of the federal government’s income-tax fraud on the American people. While he was in prison, to the chagrin of the IRS agents and Department of Justice lawyers who prosecuted (persecuted) him, and the judges who prevented him from defending himself, he continued to research and write while in prison and always came out with a new book upon his release—except the last time. In due course, Schiff was “officially” recognized by the federal OPM eaters as the most dangerous whistleblower in American history. His enemies, the voracious enemies of America’s taxpayers, made him the only American author ever to have a nonfiction, political book, The Federal Mafia, banned by the federal government in flagrant derogation of the First Amendment.

Like Nathan Hale before him, Schiff was killed by an invading enemy of the American people, in Schiff’s case the federal government. He wasn’t executed, but he was unlawfully sentenced to prison for thirteen years when he was seventy-seven years old by a cruel, despotic federal judge who was utterly dependent upon revenues from the illegal-tax scheme Schiff’s books exposed. Irwin Schiff died in a prison hospital October 16, 2015, from cancer, which may well have been successfully treated if he had been on the outside. To learn how, why and what Uncle Scam did to Irwin Schiff, to get a picture of the gross injustice the government perpetrated by thrice unlawfully imprisoning him, please read a well-documented e-book by Jim Davies, How Government Silenced Irwin Schiff. It will probably make your blood boil as it did mine.

To comprehend the largest fraud ever perpetrated requires knowing the difference between direct and indirect taxes, a difference fully understood by the Founders Fathers and the Constitution’s Framers—and Irwin Schiff. The distinguishing feature is so simple, stark and obvious in the meaning of the words direct and indirect as to defy misunderstanding. Direct taxes are collected by the government directly from taxpayers. Indirect taxes are collected indirectly from taxpayers through third parties who pay the tax to the government but pass it along to the ultimate taxpayers in the price of a product or service. Direct taxes are on taxpayers’ income or property. Indirect taxes are on taxpayers’ consumption or spending. Direct taxes cannot be avoided.

Some indirect taxes can be avoided by refraining from purchasing taxed items, although not without a cost to taxpayers even when they refrain from buying a taxed item. In a situation wherein a consumer, who is deterred from buying an item by the added cost of the tax, subjectively values the item more than it would sell for without the tax but less than its price with the tax, the disappointed consumer suffers an indeterminate but very real loss. He may never be able to own the desired item he would have had but for the tax. The seller too suffers a loss of a sale she would have had at her asking price had she not been required to pay and pass along the indirect tax. Occasionally, sellers will pay but not pass on an indirect tax to attract customers to their products or store.

An indirect tax laid upon life’s necessities is another matter altogether. A sales tax on groceries, for example, which six sadistic state legislatures have enacted to punish their most vulnerable residents, is even more diabolical than an unapportioned direct tax, for a grocery tax inevitably takes a certain amount of food from the mouths of the poorest among us to fatten the coffers of states.

What those early Americans knew about taxes was derived from England’s experience with taxes, and especially from Adam Smith’s, The Wealth of Nation, which was published in 1776, and soon became the best-selling book in America. Smith defined the difference between the two types of taxes essentially as I have here.

Being required to pay a direct tax directly to the government creates a plethora of potential problems for taxpayers, all of which impinge upon their personal freedom. Those who have been subjected to an audit of their individual income tax return (IRS form 1040) know their privacy and freedom went out the window when the IRS ordered them to produce their books and records and submit to a probing interrogation by the agency’s auditors with no limits on what they may inquire about one’s financial affairs. The Founders and Framers were not ignorant nor confused about the inquisition-like nature of direct taxes, and sought to protect Americans with those apportioning clauses. However, many of the OPM eaters in the federal government plus hordes of private lawyers and accountants, so-called “tax practitioners,” insult their illustrious forebears by alleging the Constitution’s Framers didn’t know the difference between direct and indirect taxes. The practitioners’ purpose of course is to support nefarious claims that one direct tax or another is not a direct tax but an excise tax not subject to apportionment.

Taxes on income are the most destructive to individual liberty of all taxes. Obviously, a worker’s wages are his property, often her only property. Under no circumstances, except possibly to meet the exigencies of war, would colonial Americans have acquiesced in having the fruits of their labors taxed. They would think It safer to remain under the rule of King George III and the British Parliament, and suffer the tyranny of such impositions as the Stamp Act, rather than submit to a direct tax on workers’ wages to support the new government.

Prior to adoption of the Constitution, the Articles of Confederation wisely denied the federal government any power to tax. It could only requisition revenues from the states, which in turn could tax their inhabitants. The federal government was without power to enforce its requisitions, which sometimes went unpaid. It was this “weakness” that the proponents of a strong central authority with unlimited power to tax–the so-called Federalists–sought to rectify by means of the Constitution. They and the Constitution were vigorously opposed by the Anti-Federalists.

At their first opportunity to do so, the Justices of SCOTUS effectively abolished the constitutional limitation twice stated in Article I, Sections 2 and 9, requiring direct taxes be apportioned. The denizens of Liberty.me don’t need to be told the ultimate purpose of the state and its taxes is to enrich nonproductive rulers and their cronies at the expense of productive citizens through taxes. The optimal level of taxation in the estimation of rulers is the maximum rate that won’t kill the goose. Avarice, however, inevitably impels rulers to overshoot the mark causing their nations to self-destruct. More nation-states have been brought to ruin on the anvil of overwrought taxes than by any other cause—by far. (See, Charles Adams, For Good and Evil, the Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization) The American government is well along its own road to destruction.

In 1794, with the ink on the Constitution barely dry, Congress passed a tax on “carriages for the conveyance of persons,” which was obviously a tax-the-rich, populist scheme intended to curry favor with most Americans who did not own carriages at the expense of their wealthier neighbors who did. The enacted legislation did not include apportionment.

Like all human actions motivated by greed or envy, the cost to those poorer Americans who sought to benefit at the expense of their wealthier neighbors exceeded their anticipated benefits exponentially, as their rulers turned the sword of unapportioned direct taxes on them. Subsequently, other avaricious Americans promulgated the progressive income tax to burden their wealthier neighbors, only to have it eventually suck the marrow from their own bones as their rulers repeatedly lowered tax brackets to capture the earnings of middle and lower income folks, while the wealthy targets of the tax bought politicians who installed loopholes in the income-tax laws benefiting their masters only.

This covetous carriage tax was challenged in 1796 by a man named Hylton on the grounds it obviously was a direct tax on his personal property, thus requiring apportionment. The justices of SCOTUS, in a decision of everlasting infamy, determined the tax was constitutional because it did not fall directly on Hylton’s property, but rather it was a tax on his use of his carriages measured by their value, and thus was an excise not subject to apportionment, even though Hylton was required to pay the tax directly to the government. The only possible explanation for the contorted illogic employed by the Hylton court is the ugly fact that the justices perceived their generous emoluments were inextricably tied to the collection of patently unlawful taxes. Their noxious decision became a precedent, which was observed, enlarged and reinforced in succeeding SCOTUS tax cases. The case, Hylton v. United States, 3 U.S. 171 (1796), unlocked the safe protecting taxpayers’ incomes and property from predation, and the OPM eaters poured in like crows on road kill. For the next one-hundred years the Constitution’s prohibition of unapportioned direct taxes more often than not was ignored by the nation’s legislators, courts and presidents. Finally, during the Civil War, the ultimate weapon of predation, the first income tax, was unleashed upon productive Americans.

Exactly one-hundred years after Hylton, in a case entitled Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Co. (157 U.S. 429, 1985), SCOTUS ruled that an income tax passed by Congress in 1894 was unconstitutional. In reaching its astonishing decision the court for the first time dug deep into the history of taxes in England and America from before the nation’s founding to the current time. Their research revealed the authors of the Constitution had in fact a comprehensive understanding of the difference between direct and indirect taxes, as well as the inhibiting effect of apportionment upon direct taxes. In a decision that must go down in history as the bravest any justices of SCOTUS ever rendered, the Pollock court overturned Hylton and abrogated the legal authority of many subsequent SCOTUS decisions that had relied on Hylton to uphold tax laws, which were unconstitutional for having classified various direct taxes as excises under one “legal” pretext or another relying on the “authority” of Hylton. Adopting the words of Albert Gallatin in his, A Sketch of the Finances of the United States, published in 1796, the Pollock court reiterated, “The most generally received opinion, however, is that, by direct taxes in the Constitution, those are meant which are raised on the capital or revenue of the people; by indirect, such as are raised on their expenses.”

The dedication in Schiff’s The Great Income Tax Hoax reads as follows: “To Melville Weston Fuller, Chief Justice of the United States from 1888-1910, and Stephen Johnson Field, Associate Supreme Court Justice from 1863-1897, for the judicial integrity they displayed in holding an income tax unconstitutional, and for their magnificent opinions which, by contrast, clearly reveal the criminal nature of today’s Federal Judiciary.

The Pollock decision is must reading for anyone interested in discovering the nature and extent of Uncle Sam’s income-tax scam. It not only repealed an existing progressive income tax, it made the imposition of any future income tax subject to apportioning, which effectively made taxing an individual’s income nigh on to politically impossible. It came at the apex of the progressive movement in America. Progressives went ballistic. They spent the next eighteen years working day and night to overturn Pollock, and finally persuaded Americans to adopt the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

The Sixteenth Amendment failed to accomplish its purpose of overruling Pollock, although the IRS at some later point began enforcing the income tax as if it had. The Amendment did not repeal the two Constitutional provisions requiring direct taxes be apportioned, and it left open the crucial question: what constitutes “incomes?” The only possible way to understand this matter in all its ramifications is to read two of Schiff’s books, The Great Income Tax Hoax, and The Federal Mafia. Suffice to say here, SCOTUS has defined income as corporate profits (gross income minus all expenses), and wages obviously, are not gains nor profits. They are an even exchange of a worker’s property–her labor–for her employer’s property—its money—equal in value to her labor. No gain or profit is realized in an even exchange.

There is a plethora of federal-court cases on the legality of the income tax and subsidiary or related questions with essentially all of them interpreting the income-tax laws contrary to Schiff’s expositions in his masterful books. Quite a few of the cases that OPM consumers such as judges, tax liaxxx lawyers and tax accountants cite to prove Schiff wrong are decisions of federal district courts and circuit courts of appeal cases in which Schiff was the losing party. Two of the primary beneficiaries of the impenetrable, 90,000-page, 4-million-word Internal Revenue Code are tax lawyers and tax accountants. There isn’t a human alive who can comprehend the Code, but these pretend they can. However, as Schiff points out, the legal maxim, “void for vagueness,” alone makes the IR Code unlawful. If you do not understand a law you cannot obey it, and no one understands the Code.

These creepy, subhuman OPM eaters, tax lawyers and tax accountants, with the help of their partners in the IRS and DOJ, have infested the internet, particularly Wikipedia, with defamatory commentary about how dishonest Irwin Schiff was and how utterly preposterous his “theories.” Don’t believe a word of it. I knew Irwin Schiff. He knew more about the Constitution and more about America’s tax laws than any SCOTUS justice since the nation’s founding. The only justice who comes even close to Schiff in understanding was Chief Justice Fuller of Pollock-opinion fame. The amount of time and money spent discrediting Schiff should warn any thinking person that Schiff wasn’t the nut case his enemies would have you believe. When it comes to the federal income tax, more than any man or woman before him or since, Schiff knew whereof he spoke.

How could all those hundreds or even thousands of judges, SCOTUS justices, accountants, tax lawyers, IRS personnel, DOJ lawyers, presidents, senators and representatives, plus an entire armada of OPM consuming folks be wrong and Irwin Schiff right? FOLLOW THE MONEY! If Irwin Schiff is right, and he is, the individual income tax is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. Federal spending by and on all those OPM consumers will need be cut to a fraction of what it is today. If progressives went ballistic over the Pollock decision, I imagine they would start another Civil War if or when Irwin Schiff’s truth becomes general knowledge, and the people force their government to honor the Constitution by ditching the individual income tax. With multi-trillions of dollars involved in the historic mega-fraud Schiff uncovered, the tax consumers, like other rulers of all times, will say, or do, or be whatever it takes to keep the bonanza of easy access to taxpayers’ pockets open. If bodies, like Schiff’s, must fall, so be it.

One of the tactics employed by the OPM eaters to discredit Irwin Schiff is to point to his several criminal convictions for income tax evasion, regurgitating snippets from the courts’ decisions all over the Internet. When seeing these slanders, I urge readers of this essay to consider two critical factors, which demonstrate conclusively that Schiff was never lawfully convicted of a single crime.

In every one of his tax cases, Irwin Schiff argued that he had committed no crime because the authorities had misinterpreted the law, which was the basis for the charges against him. This is demonstrably true. However, as every American who has served on a jury has been told by the presiding judge, in courtroom trials the judge alone explains the law to the jury. The jurors are told by the judge they may only judge the facts—not the law. With his innocence, freedom and his very life at stake, Schiff’ was prohibited by the judges from explaining his innocence by explaining the law, a chore the judges reserved to themselves, then proceeding to misstate it. Those who have read his books know how thoroughly Schiff understood the law and how incisively he could explain it. Of course, none of his judges allowed the juries to read his books. In other words, he was prevented by self-interested judges from defending himself. It is amazing to me that his treatment at the hands of a federal judiciary obligated to protect his freedom didn’t send him over the edge, but it didn’t. The charge of the OPM eaters that he pleaded insanity at one of his trials is a scurrilous lie.

In every one of Schiff’s cases, as well as on every one of his appeals, the judges were disqualified under U.S. law to preside over those cases. They were required by law to recuse themselves for cause, but failed to obey the law. Here is what the law, the Code of Conduct for United States Judges, requires, “Canon 3, (C) Disqualification… (1) A judge shall disqualify himself or herself in a proceeding in which the judge’s impartiality might reasonably be questioned, including but not limited to instances in which… (c) the judge knows that the judge, individually or as a fiduciary, or the judge’s spouse or minor child residing in the judge’s household, has a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy or in a party to the proceeding, or any other interest that could be affected substantially by the outcome of the proceeding.” In all of Schiff’s cases, his judges had a financial interest in the subject matter in controversy and a financial interest in the opposing party–the United States–the judges’ employer for gosh sakes! In all his cases, the subject matter was the income tax, in which federal judges have a large, personal, financial interest because of their generous salaries and Cadillac benefits derived from revenues produced by the income tax, the legality of which Schiff was challenging, and those munificent emoluments were being paid to Schiff’s judges by the same party that was prosecuting him. No clearer example of judicial bias can be found in the annals of criminal-court proceedings.

The purpose of the twice-stated, apportioning clauses in the Constitution was to protect Americans’ liberty from the potential ravages of direct taxes. Biased judges protecting the revenues that pay their emoluments accounts for the egregious injustice suffered by Irwin Schiff. It also explains the fact that in essentially every federal court case wherein apportionment was a consideration, the only concern expressed in the opinions of the many judges and justices is for the negative impact apportioning would have on the government’s ability to raise revenues, ignoring the many benefits apportioning confers on individual liberty. Apportioning taxes has thus become a dead letter without the necessity of repealing those two pesky clauses from the Constitution. Why? FOLLOW THE MONEY!

If any reader is interested the grounds on which apportioning is dismissed from the Constitution by a distinguished members of the OPM-eaters class, see: https://law.utexas.edu/faculty/calvinjohnson/directtax.pdf The author of this lengthy essay, a tax lawyer and former U.S. Treasury Department tax attorney, brings a virtual library of authorities in support of his contention that the Framers failed to realize the potential damage they did to the government’s ability to tax by failing to strike the offensive apportioning clauses from the Constitution. (The dummies!) His catalogue of historical references dwarfs those of Schiff and the Pollock-court opinion, but don’t be fooled. A careful analysis of the author’s sources reveals more about his tax-consumer bias by its omissions of important historical sources relied upon by both Schiff, the Pollock opinion and the Framers. Professor Johnson also failed to examine the history of taxation in England, which the Founders and Framers studied in depth to arrive at their deep knowledge of all aspects of taxation. Nor does the tax-law professor even attempt to understand Adam Smith’s objections to direct taxes nor the influence Smith had on the concurrent assessment of taxes by those influential early Americans. Why? FOLLOW THE MONEY.

If anyone is interested in reading the Anti-Federalists Papers by men who opposed the Constitution as dangerous to liberty, here is a compilation with a table of contents with links to many of those documents. In one of them, #36, is a letter written by “The Federal Farmer,” who is presumed by historians to be Richard Henry Lee of Virginia. Quoting from it: “I am sensible also, that it is said that congress will not attempt to lay and collect internal taxes; that it is necessary for them to have the power, though it cannot probably be exercised. I admit that it is not probable that any prudent congress will attempt to lay and collect internal taxes, especially direct taxes: but this only proves, that the power would be improperly lodged in congress, and that it might be abused by imprudent and designing men.” RIP, Mr. Lee, you were right, and those designing men have included some of the most revered U.S. presidents, senators, representatives, judges and justices of SCOTUS.

The IRS currently enforces the Internal Revenue Code in flagrant violation of the First, Fourth and Fifth Articles of the BOR. The Agency doesn’t even enforce its own Internal Revenue Code as written. The Code recognizes the fact that the tax must be voluntary to conform to the Constitution, and it is so written, but it is deceptively shrouded from the public by the Code’s incomprehensible complexity that even a brilliant scholar needs help deciphering its four-million words. If you care to understand why you lawfully need not file or pay the federal income tax, you need to read Schiff.

You will never learn you’ve been screwed by the income tax from your president, congress or the courts. Corrupt “public servants” all survive and thrive on your taxes. They are OPM eaters, hooked on income-tax revenues. Your wages are their opiate. FOLLOW THE MONEY.

Disciple of Jesus, Voluntaryist, Writer, "Tax Denier" (current IRS term) Illegal-Tax Protester (former IRS designation to which I added a hyphen to make what I protest clear), Founder, 2nd Abolition Movement rid American of the enslaving individual income tax.